Cleaning help scored!

All RIGHT! I decided to use some of the buckolas I’ve been stashing in savings each month to hire some cleaning help. Someone left a business card on the gate asking for work, so I called. Two delightful Latina women showed up at the door, one of them sort of speaking English and the other less sort-of. They look smart and they sound like they can do the job…and they both need the work. They were thrilled to land a job, and I am thrilled at the prospect of having someone to take over some of the labor around this place.

I know, I know. It violates one of Funny’s Money Principles: Do it yourself.

But Funny has done done it herself and is done doing it.

Truth to tell, I’m getting too old to handle all the work around this place. It’s simply more than I can do by myself, what with the pool, the yard, the dog, the four-bedroom house, the errands, the bookkeeping, the endless Workman Waltz, the chronic sleep deprivation, the freelance business, and the job with the two-hour commute. Result is that I’m falling behind, and the result of that is that nothing is getting done. First I let the weekly cleaning morph into biweekly. Next thing I knew, I was only cleaning once a month. If you let it go that long, then you have a HUGE job on your hands, one that leaves you dead exhausted by the time you finish. Especially if you start pretty near dead exhausted because you didn’t get any sleep the night before. Then you still have to deal with the laundry, the pool, the shopping, the dog, the yard, Quicken, and the freelance work you didn’t attend to while you were scrubbing floors and bathrooms.

This is great. Today I can vacuum the DE off the bottom of the pool, do the laundry, and edit another 100 pages of detective novel copy without feeling bad because the bathrooms need to be cleaned and the floors need to be vacuumed, dust-mopped, and steam-cleaned. Yesh! Tomorrow I can make a Costco run and that will be ALL I have to do (except for editing copy): no vacuuming, dust-mopping, steam-cleaning, bathroom-scrubbing, kitchen scrubbing, mirror-polishing, window-washing, furniture-dusting, sheet-changing misery. Yes, yes, yes!!!!

The ladies want $85 for their trouble. They asked for $90 to come once a month, but I talked them down a few bucks. That’s only $42.50 apiece for plenty of un-fun labor. If they come around once a month, then I’ll only have to do the job myself once a month to get the place thoroughly cleaned every two weeks, which suffices. Eight-five bucks is less than half of what I will earn for proofreading & lightly copyediting a detective novel.If I’m working very hard and very fast, I can clean the house in four hours. Why should I use four hours of my $60/hour time (i.e., $240) when I can pay someone else to do an unpleasant job for the price of 2.8 hours of my time? What the heck am I working for, anyway?Any day, I’d rather get paid $60 an hour for reading fiction than save $85 by doing four hours of noxious work.

A bargain, my friends. It’s a bargain.